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The great charm of cats is their rampant egotism, their devil-may-care attitude toward responsibility, their disinclination to earn an honest dollar. Robertson Davies
Thursday morning 4 of us were hanging out outside the building when one of maintenance guys said, "Hey, Richard, somebody put some kittens in your truck." I said, "You gotta be shittin’ me," as I made my way to the side of my truck. Sure enough there were 2 kittens, 4-5 weeks old I’d say, snuggled up next to a tire in the bed of my truck. I went inside, got a box and put the kittens into it. Called Karen at the vet cuz one of her friends is a mucky muck with Friends of Strays. Space is at a premium at the shelters right now. Karen said she’d call me back. It was right before lunch so I told her I’d be at home. I put the box with kittens on the seat and drove home. Just as I stopped the truck I see a cat jump onto the tailgate and into the bed of the truck. I got out, looked at her and said, "You little devil. You’ve done it again." Until that moment I’d been thinking somebody I know put those kittens in my truck and if I catch him/her I’m gonna forget all about Gandhi’s principles of non-violence. But a smile just formed on my face as I thought back 4-5 months when this little queen had done the same thing to me. These little tigers had spent all morning in the bed of my truck and, thankfully, it was really overcast so no harm came to them. Just like the first time. One Sunday I went to open the screen door on the porch to go somewhere when I bumped something and saw this tiger scoot to the end of the carport. I opened the door, looked around and in the corner were 4 kittens, maybe 2 weeks old. I left them alone and went on my way. I didn’t see the queen or her babies again that day. Monday morning I drove to work and when I was getting out of the truck I hear these plaintive little cries, meu, meu, meu. I look in the truck bed and there are those 4 babies in the corner, behind the tire (yeah, same tire). Another cloudy, overcast day. Kittens into a box and back home I go. For about 3 weeks I had to look into the bed to ensure there weren’t any kittens in it and very often there they were. This was this little queen’s first litter and none survived. She moved them constantly and I wonder if that played into their not surviving. The lady who gave me Kismet and Brutus also brought a trap by Thursday afternoon. When these kittens are weaned the trap is gonna get put to good use. I’ve not seen Mama or her babies since but they looked healthy so Mama has apparently learned how to be a good mother. Hopefully the prolonged absence of her kittens Thursday taught her a lesson. We’ll see. I called Karen back and told her the mystery had been solved and we didn’t need to find a home for these precious little ones. Good thing, too. Her friend was having minor surgery and wasn’t available.
Speaking of Kismet and Brutus. When talking to the previous guardian she was unsure as to when she got these 2 tigers. She had gotten them from her sister so I asked her to talk to her sister so we could get an accurate age for these little tigers. The lady had them at 12 for Kismet and 7 for Brutus. Wellllllll, she talked to her sister and was told that her sister had given her the tigers in 1997 and that Kismet was 5 at the time and Brutus was a kitten. That meant that Kismet is 17 and Brutus is 12. Big difference. I had thought that Kismet was a little thin, even with the hyperthyroid, and I’d have to fatten her up a bit. For 17 years old, though, she looks gooooooood, but keeping her weight up is even more important now. I’ve also noticed that she walks on what would be her right wrist instead of on her paw pads. This is a consequence of declawing. Sad, because it has to be somewhat painful. I will definitely ask the vet about this Tuesday when we go in for bloodwork. Don’t know what we can do about it, if anything, though. Grrrrrr.
Don’t be shy, share your tiger stories with us.
The Tao’s principle is spontaneity. Lao Tzu
49 Comments
Fluffy read up on How To Get Adopted. He was a neighborhood cat for years before I discovered he was living on my porch. I fed him there since I thought he would return home to an owner. He would look longingly in through the front window by climbing up on a porch table, this went on for a year or so. Then I came home from work and while he came up greeting me, as usual, he was leaning against the porch slats and limping. The next morning, when he was still doing this, I took him in to my vet. He had a torn cruciform ligament that had to have several hundreds of dollars of surgery. The vet was saying it wasn’t absolutely necessary, but he would stay in pain without it. I said go ahead, and besides, had been telling online friends about it and already had promises of help with financing repairs. As it was, I was not to get off cheaply, but Fluffy had been a friend for years, how could I say Tough beans, you shoulda stayed healthy? like a wingnut.
Cleocatra doesn’t accept him entirely, but they play chase without fighting. Both are really sweet.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/2…..470652373/
Cleocatra is a WONDERFUL name! I may steal it, if another kitteh moves in and it seems appropriate. What other Egyptian names did you come up with? Any suitable for males?
Ptah (P is silent)
Min
for females
Tiye
Isis
Ishtar
Lovely names! Mr. Marion in Savannah has a thing for Egypt, and I suspect we may be having Egyptian named kittehs in the future. Assuming, of course, that Hoover and Delilah are okay with that…!
Good on you. I’m assuming Fluffy is the white? Verrrry handsome. Cleocatra ain’t no ugly duckling, either.
Other way around. I adopted Cleocatra, the fluffy white one, from a litter born to a feral cat that moved in under my house. I named them all Egyptian names, found homes for the others, kept the shiest one. Eventually, I did get the feral mom to come up to me, and she still lives around the house, now most of the time on the roof.
A fitting way to honor the cat goddess
That was my motivation. And Isis and Ramses were two others, the third I never formally named as it was promised to some one. One blue eye and one green one, and I learned later that often two-color eyed kitties are crazy, as this one was. Took to leaping off the curtain rod onto its family. But they loved it dearly, last I heard.
I cohabitated with a Kismet once. A whip-smart black stray who adopted my roommate and demanded top-rate caretaking. Kismet’s special talent was playing fetch with a little bouncy ball. His second talent was escape–which he only seemed to do for me. He would tear out the door and down the spiral staircase into the very creepy basement of the apartment building where we lived. He would find the darkest part of the basement (of course there was no electric light down there) and burrow into a patch of dirt floor. He was jet black and hard to find, so I would have to feel around in the dark for him. He was a pleasure and an honor to know, that cat.
My Kismet obviously inherited your Kismet’s caretaking demands. Prolly also has a Siamese somewhere in her background. Most vocal, loudest tiger I’ve ever lived with.
My neighbor found kittens in a very sheltered and secluded part of his yard several months back. The mama is feral.
We rescued the kittens and socialized them. He got them fixed and the adoption folks found the final home last weekend.
Wednesday, he called me and said, “I just found 3 kittens.” These were barely past the eyes open stage and too young to leave mama. So we put them back for mama to take care of for a few more weeks.
Within two days, she moved them, we know not where. She had to jump up over a 6 plus foot wall with those babies to move them from where they were.
I hope they are doing OK. No one has seen her since, but I am sure she is nearby. I told him to keep feeding her, where she has been used to finding food. The babies are adorable. . .
Drives me nuts when they bring ‘em around and disappear. Then I worry about them when I haven’t seen ‘em in a couple days. Just like Mama Thursday. I saw her this afternoon when I got back from the store but no sign of kittehs. Wouldn’t show me where they were when I asked her, either.
OOOOH… Caturday! Right now our senior kitteh is Hoover. He showed up a little over a year ago, as I was sitting outside in the garden. He was aggressively friendly, covered in fleas, and skinny as a rake. I got him some food and he made a sound I’ve never heard another cat make, and I’ve been cat staff for 60 years or so. If you had been crawling in the desert with no food or water for a week and someone came and put an umbrella over you, gave you a cool drink of water and your favorite food in the whole world you would make the sound he did. He was obviously a boy, about 6 to 9 months old, the best our vet could figure out. We had his Power Balls removed (I used to say powder puffs, but someone suggested that was insulting) and he’s been with us ever since. He used to have the run of the world during the day and stay home at night, until he stopped coming home at night and would show up the next day sans collar and name tag. My guess is that one of the neighborhood kids was doing the “look who showed up on the porch, can we keep him?” routine, so now he stays inside.
When Hoover came to us he lived with Victoria, who was not really thrilled with the idea of a baby brother, but they reached an understanding before she went to the Great Catnip Patch at age 19. Hoover, while aggressively affectionate, has never really been a lap cat, so after Victoria died our laps were empty. Off we went to PetSmart to their Saturday adoptions, where we found Delilah. She now stays inside, for the same reason that Hoover does. (She’s a bit flighty anyway, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable with her wandering loose in the wide world.)
So we’re currently staff to 2 inside kittehs. There are also several neighborhood cats who get fed on the porch, and some of whom come inside for visits, but that’s another story for another Caturday…
How on earth did you manage to make the aptly named Hoover an indoor cat? I have NEVER been successful at keeping cats indoors. And he was used to pulling all nighters, too.
When I shifted from indoor/outdoor to strictly indoor I just made sure I said no to Min, Yang and Blaze if they were by the door when I left the apt, gently running them off if they persisted trying to make for the door. This before I ever opened the door. It didn’t take long before they didn’t even bother looking up when I went to go out.
I’ve only had one get out. In my previous apt the screens in the kitchen windows were rotten. They were pretty high up but Bapu got up there and just walked through the screen. Since I was moving in a couple weeks I left him out, feeding him at the regular time, but in the carport. He never went further than the next yard far as I could tell. After I got everything moved I came back the next morning with a carrier, put it in the garage where he couldn’t see it and grabbed him while he was eating. Not a one has tried to leave my present place.
Well, in the beginning he REALLY wanted to get outside, but now not so much. It’s not that he’s getting lazy, mind you… He’s the lion who lurks in the hallway ready to bring down all wildebeests who venture that way, but I think he realizes that warm and dry is very often nicer than cold, dirty and wet. We still have to watch when we open the door, but more and more he’s looking at the door to the outside world with a “So?” expression on his face. (Anyone who says cats don’t have expressions has never lived with one.)
What a lovely picture of your Delilah! My Gracie has similar coloring, but she is bold. Keeping her indoors was disasterous; she was unhappy and the smell of her marking made me very unhappy. Now that she’s outside, only the local mice are unhappy.
Caturday!!
SD, no surprise the Momcat comes around you to have babies, you are the male version of the Crazy Cat Lady ;)
teh often-overlooked crazy cat man
lol!
Just how many cats do you serve?
Yep, looks like my house alright.
Yay, Caturday!
We’re still feeding skinny stray orange tiger Madison, although we were gone for a few days and he went to the neighbor’s instead. My orange tiger, Nicki (so named because someone once took a bite out of his ear) sits on the desk in front of the window and watches Madison eat and sunbathe. I can’t tell if they’re longing or glaring gazes.
One day about 15 years ago, one of my coworkers pulled into the driveway of our shop and looked under the hood before coming in shaking his head. “I kept hearing these noises while I was driving,” he said, “but I can’t find anything.”
About 10 minutes later this little tiger kitten jumps down out of the front wheel well and huddles near the back tire, looking a little stunned but otherwise OK. I went out with a carton of cottage cheese and she disappeared but came back out and gobbled it all up after I went back inside. After eating she didn’t leave when I went out to her. We sat together about 5 feet apart for awhile, then she came over and let me pet her. I ended up taking her home.
She never got over her wild ways, never was completely tame. She didn’t like sharing anything with the other cats and after a couple of years began peeing and pooping in really nasty places – our bed, my son’s crib, sometimes when he was in it, the kitchen table. I was beside myself, thinking I was going to have go take her to the shelter because I couldn’t take it anymore. Her last option, I told her, was to be an outdoors cat. We lived in the mountains and I didn’t think she’d survive.
Instead, she thrived. We built her a cat palace that was attached to the side of the house, just outside the kitchen. It had a tiny cat door that coyotes and others couldn’t get through, she was near us yet not with us, and she was thrilled. She was very affectionate when we were outside.
One day when she was about 8, I can home to find her on teh back stairs, upside-down against the stairs in a defensive position, dead. Not a mark I could find on her. I suspect a heart attack from fear or a rattlesnake bite.
I still miss my Mia.
That’s sad. When I lived in Imnaha, OR my biggest fear for Tiye was rattlesnakes. Tigers just can’t resist that thing gliding through the grass.
Our current tigers are very aware of snakes. We had one in the back yard a few weeks ago and baby Belle just fuzzed right up when she heard the rattle, bounding bravely past the bush it was in to get to the house. I worry more about coyotes here. We hear them almost every night down by the river, howling.
on ages given by former guardians:
curmudgeon cat [and his older ‘brother’] were adopted from the pound [yes, the former owners HAD tried other methods of finding a home for them first, as i found out later]. older brother, who has since crossed the rainbow bridge, was listed as being about 6 years old, while jack bauer kitty was supposedly about 4. when i took them to the vet for their post-adoption checkup, i was asked why i thought their ages were 4 and 6, as the vet thought they were both clearly closer to 10 [or possibly older]. i never did find out if the owners were fudging in order to make the cats more adoptable, if the pound was fudging in order to make the cats more adoptable, if there was a records mixup at the pound, or if the pound employees just plain made a wild guess. it could very easily have been the last, as our ’shelter’ is overwhelmed and understaffed [and underfunded] and ends up killing about 70-80% of the animals it takes in.
on finding kittens in strange places:
the crew i have now came about because the first litter [of the ones that live here now] was born [and lived in for the first few weeks] in the stack of large flowerpots stashed in the far corner of my little-used porch. which is why i love this lolcat and this lolcat so much.
the very first litter of kittens was a box of orphans that one of my coworkers found in the middle of the road on their way to the office one day. i wasn’t going to take them on, but neither was anyone else in the office, and said coworker [who in all fairness was in no way able to take them on either, but what person in their right mind could drive away after seeing that?] was going to take them to the pound. that did it. fortunately i found good homes for them all. unfortunately this left me thinking i could always find good homes for them all in the future [which in one sense i did, given that the latest 2 batches are all living the life of reilly at my place right now].
those bebbeh kittehs are sooo cute.
It’s hard to keep just one.
i was very well-disciplined, at first. i didn’t keep any of the very first batch [3 kittens].
as of right now, i ended up with all 11 ferals [1 momcat, 4 kittens in the first litter, 6 kittens in the second litter], plus the resident cat [curmudgeon cat], plus the dog [who thinks he’s a cat], hence the number 13 here.
It is impossible! to spay a cat that’s nursing, I went through a spell when I had an indulgent husband and ended up with an overload of cats. Who doesn’t love kittens?
I’m more sensible now, altho I do intend to have 74 cats when I turn 74.
it’s my understanding that you can spay nursing momcats, though the trouble i had with my crew was capturing the momcat in time.
in spite of the fact that she’s now very tame [i’m guessing she was a pet that got turned loose when the owner moved], it was the kittens who were initially less afraid of coming into the house.
Me and Ellie are going to be roommates when we’re 74 and have 148 cats between us. Most of them kittens.
Oh, Gah! No more kittens for me…it’s like raising small children. Cute, but a lot of work!
aww Sounds like Heaven!
you and i could be evil twins [or perhaps more accurately, bookends]. i sincerely hope to have far fewer cats when i turn 74, but i do seem to be making up for that on the front end right now.
The look on curmudgeon cat’s face is classic. I’ve seen the same look about 50 bazillion times on Abner, who down deep (very, very, very deep) in his cat heart is a devoted and loving fluffball.
that’s his standard response to everything, if he’s in a good mood. in spite of the, uh, strong personality, he’s turned out to be a wonderful pet and best buddy to both me and the dog.
So how does he express his displeasure? Abner used to take all the curtains down when he was inconvenienced in any way. But that was kittenplay. He’s been known to draw blood.
loudly. and often. he’s a very talented and prolific orator.
LOLz
LOL I love the strtr kit.
I guess before I can indoorize my cats, I’ll have to break down and dig out the screens.
My Sweet Pea used to bring mice INTO the house, I think she was storing them for winter hunts. Imagine having three cats and setting traps. “The idea!” as my Gammy would say.
storing them for winter hunts!
very intelligent and far-thinking cat.
When people ask me how many cats I have, I always tell them, “We don’t count them, we just feed them and love them as long as we can.” Of course, that is the Royal “We.”
You’ve seen that plastic version of the Crazy Cat Lady? I told my friends they would die if anyone ever gave it to me. Somehow, one of them did not hear and got me one for Christmas. I knew before I opened it what it was. My friend was So Disappointed when I said, “I know what this is, and it is Not. Funny.”
i’ve always kind of liked the idea of having my own action figure.
I tell ‘em, “More than one.” Tigers are like potato chips, ya can’t just have one.
Spay and neuter! They live better and longer lives this way, and it brings down the cat population. I love the felines, but there are way too many without homes. So get those little cuties fixed!
Yeah, yeah, preachin’ to the choir. First ya gotta catch ‘em, then ya have to be able to pay for it. Not all vets are linked up with Alley Cat Allies or other stray/feral orgs. Plus the neighbors who feed them have to cooperate and that’s no easy task.
Oh, man, I missed Caturday again. I have things to do before bed, and it’s alrady near bedtime, but I had to read it all.
Speaking of elderly and ferals – “my” feral elder – her care turned over to me when the then 90-yr old lady next door (who fed and loved her from a kitten)had to move to assisted living, may be over twenty. I can’t believe it, but if Ann’s memory is right about when she was born under the house, she must be 21.
Her muzzle and front legs are turning whiter all the time – she’s basically a gray cat, with stubby tail, but she still moves fast when she hears a scary sound (which is most sounds).
I think she’s a little thinner lately, and whenever I don’t see her for a day or two I think she’s gone to kitty heaven – but then she pops up outside the door at breakfast time.
Have new neighbors (4 of us share a central patio and backyard), so she’s lying very low right now, but when I come near her hiding place she comes out and scolds me. Guess I oughtn’t to be letting strangers disturb her schedule.
She’s very sweet; lets me stroke her head and back, meets me when I come home from work, but it took some time to get to that point.
I’m late as well, but I wanted to say thank you, Southern Dragon, for another excellent post! On Friday night we came home with a new kitteh! We had lost our beautiful big black Mongkut in May from old age and ill health, and it has felt so empty, even though we do still have three other wonderful kittehs. Four kittehs just seems to be the right number for everything to be in balance around here! We had dinner at a friend’s house on Friday that we hadn’t seen in a year, and as we were leaving she said she had a wonderful cat but had to find a new home for him because she has some renters in her home and they are allergic to cats. She asked if I wanted to see him. I looked at Mr. Votus and I knew I would be a goner, but I said yes. He is absolutely darling, a year and a half old, solid black with gold eyes and looks like a smaller version of Mongkut. He had a rough start in life, but he is in good health now and just a love bug! His name is Treford, an old English surname of a family line from 1120 that ran in to the Tudors eventually. He slept on the bed with us every night since we got him! We take him to the vet for a checkup tomorrow, but he’s had all his shots already. The other cats are curious, and he is definitely a lover and no fighter. He makes a lot of hissing noise but that’s about it. The others have stopped hissing because they realize he isn’t going to do anything! He’s wonderful. No pictures yet, but I’ll try to get some soon.
They just seem to know when there’s somebody around who will provide them with a good home, don’t they? Great story.